Thank goodness for Vintage Books, which continues to release the series of precious novels, in English for the first time, by Iréne Némirovsky, a writer who died at Auschwitz in 1942.

“The Wine of Solitude” was published in 1935 in France when the author turned 32. The story loosely tracks her own life of growing up in Kiev before the Russian revolution, then moving with her family to St. Petersburg and later to Finland before settling in Paris just after World War I.

The novel's main theme is the daughter's difficult relationship with her parents. Her father was absent often, building the family's wealth. Her mother is self-centered and takes a lover, who keeps a lustful eye on the daughter, Héléne, as she grows toward womanhood.

Héléne's only solid relationship is with her governess. Némirovsky, in other works, has dealt with both of her parents with extremely negative portraits in other novels, “David Golder” for her father and “Jezebel” for her mother.

In “The Wine of Solitude,” Némirovsky delivers balanced impressions of them. Héléne both loves and loathes her father. Héléne despises her negligent mother but also pities her as the mother's beauty fades.

As the I-narrator, Héléne also describes the messiness in the family's Paris apartment that aptly symbolizes the decay in Europe that emerged between the world wars: “Roses no one tended died in their vases; a piano whose cover was never raised by anyone had been pushed into a corner, between torn lace curtains that had cost a thousand francs a metre and were now full of cigarette burns. The carpets were covered in ash; the scornful, silent servants set down the coffee on a corner of the desk and disappeared, their bitter smiles passing harsh judgment on these ‘mad foreigners.'”

Némirovsky basically has written a “coming of age” novel about herself, focusing toward a time when she can break away from her family and become her own person. Plenty of tension and senses of loss develop along the way through Némirovsky's phenomenal ability to write about the human character.